Retail Assist System review:


he “multichannel” world is a lot more fragmented than many


Merret Supply Chain Solution www.retail-assist.co.uk


of its practitioners would like to admit, not only in its view of how the multichannel world works, but also in how the respective systems that


support those views manage data. In the simplest possible example, there


are the famous “silos” of data that everyone talks about and most do little to truly resolve. This means that the call centre, the website and the retail stores all have different views of the customer, of merchandise, of marketing offers, and even of stock positions—quantities on-hand/available to sell, on order, and such. Eliminating these silos, however, has proven to be exceedingly difficult for many more companies than you might imagine. It is just one of those persistent facts of life. But the problem goes even deeper. If we eliminate the customer-facing, front-end parts of this complex machine, and focus on the back end where the stock lives, there are still lots of moving parts that are often unsynchronised, making it difficult to operate at anywhere near peak efficiency, or even to retain a healthy share of profit margins that a company should otherwise enjoy. Merchandising finds it difficult to get stock positions, do forecasting, and make intelligent purchasing decisions. The warehouse may find its booking-in diary worse than useless, QC is haphazard—because the database for managing stock intake is a shambles and doesn’t update automatically based on supplier history/scorecards, and put-away is anyone’s guess. As for picking and despatch—to stores, depots, or customers—managing pick batches and warehouse-walk order may leave a lot to be desired. So it’s not a pretty picture. Which is why


retailers with multiple sales channels will want to check out the Merret Supply Chain Solution from Retail Assist (retail-assist.co.uk), which supports a suite of tools that could help you clean up your act.


A shining example The foundation of the system is a unified


10


stock management database that Merret’s tools depend on, providing a single version of the truth. Supported by this unified data repository are: a merchandise management


Direct Commerce Catalogue e-business www.catalog-biz.com


shapes up the back end T


By Ernie Schell


solution; a warehouse management solution; supplier tracking tools; store management tools; multichannel order management; CRM; planning and forecasting; business intelligence; financials; reporting, plus a home shopping module for order entry and an EPoS module from vendor partner Infinity POS. But, since the “back end” is where the strength of this system lies, that’s what we’ll focus on here. The unified database at the heart of


the system means that users benefit from centralised product definitions, centralised purchasing, and centralised product pricing. These are not trivial benefits, by any means. Of course, this doesn’t mean you have to shoehorn everything into a one-size-fits-all bucket. Just the opposite. You can have different descriptions for products on the web than you do in the call centre or for merchandising, for instance, but you have a consolidated view of these descriptions in a single place, so that one individual can manage all variations, or different people can manage each variation— but at least everyone sees what everyone else is doing. Makes a big difference! The benefits in the distribution centre are


equally valuable: stock positions are consistent across the board; buying and merchandising have visibility of intake and despatch to support store management services, stock in place, tolerance levels (for stock adjustments), quality control routines and benchmarks, return-to-warehouse functions, and inbound transportation. Direct commerce fulfilment functions can be managed and monitored from a single point of view. There is cross- channel consistency in definitions for ratio packs and transfer packs. Picking methods can be driven by integrated preallocation triggering (reserving stock for designated stores before booking in) and can include “baby” replenishment (to top-up shelf counts); an optional tool supports initial allocations by store grade and store with size allocations and triggers. Replenishment can be manual or automatic, for set levels by SKU; if manual, the system can still suggest replenishment quantities. Store grades are used to determine relative


stock quantities at specific levels of the merchandise hierarchy. For example, Store A may be a big seller of mens home shirts while


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